LA Times' suit over mayor's auto-deleting texts likely to advance

LOS ANGELES (CN) — A Superior Court judge on Friday said he was leaning toward allowing a public records lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Times against the city of LA over the mayor’s text messages to go forward to discovery and then a trial.

At issue: Is a text message a public record? And is the city obligated to read through every employee’s text messages before deciding which ones should be kept?

The case stems from a public records request filed by a pair of Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times reporters for text messages sent or received by Mayor Karen Bass in January 2025 as deadly wildfires began to spread through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Bass was away in Ghana when the fires broke out, and was heavily criticized for traveling when the National Weather Service had been forecasting “critical fire weather conditions."

The reporters were told that there were no text messages. When asked why, the mayor’s lawyer told them that her phone was set to automatically delete its texts 30 days after they were sent or received.

The text messages presented a thorny legal question. While the California Public Records Act, enacted in 1968, defines a “public record” broadly — “any writing containing information relating to the conduct of the public’s business” — it doesn’t actually say anything about what records need to be retained. That question has been open to interoperation by the courts and remains somewhat ambiguous, especially since the advent of electronic communications.

Eventually, the mayor’s staff was able to recover some of Bass’ text messages. But the LA Times sued anyway, seeking a court order prohibiting the destruction of any public records less than two years old — including text messages that were deemed to be official government business.

The city said such an injunction would be a logistical nightmare, requiring staffers to regularly comb through thousands of text messages and manually delete them. In August, Superior Court Judge Maurice Leiter agreed that the petition was too broad: “To the extent petitioners allege that the city has a duty to retain all text messages and ‘other forms of communications’ of all city employees, including those held on personal devices, that might relate in some way to ‘public business,’ that theory is not supported by [law].”

The Times field an amended version of the petition, this time focusing on the auto-delete issue. On Friday, Superior Court Judge Stephen Goorvitch was more sympathetic to the new complaint, and said he was inclined to overrule the city’s second demurrer — although he wasn’t entirely clear what the Times was asking for.

“I think you’re asking me to issue a writ that prevents the city from automatically deleting text messages,” Goorvitch told LA Times attorney Kelly Aviles.

“Correct,” said Aviles, but perhaps there would be more, once they’d gotten through the discovery phase. “We have to get these messages in order to get small glimpse of what messages they’re destroying.”

She later added: “I think we’re going to show they just destroy all text messages … We believe it’s a massive amount of records they’re destroying.”

Reuben Cahn, a partner at Bienert Katzman Littrell representing the city, said the Times’ argument still had no legal basis.

“The city has to decide what to do with this flood of text messages and signal messages,” Cahn said. “Are we really going to require employees to spend hours going through them?”

The city has argued that text messages are “ephemeral types of electronic communication” and not “intended to provide future reference for the author or recipient let alone a public official record.”

“What you’re saying is, if it’s important it’s not going to be a text message,” Goorvitch said, pressing Cahn.

“Not important,” Cahn corrected him. “If it’s something intended for future reference,” he said, it would be put in a “letter, email, memo, some other more formal means of communication.”

Aviles, clearly frustrated at the argument, said later: “This has gotten so convoluted, because they don’t want to admit what their position is, because it’s completely insane”

“It’s not insane,” the judge responded calmly. “They’re saying they have discretion to interpret the statues.”

Nonetheless, Goorvitch said, he thought the Times argument was strong enough to merit a trial. But he took the arguments under submission, saying he would consider sustaining the demurrer without prejudice, giving the Times yet another chance to amend their petition.

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